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95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

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Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#311

Post by sillyfluke »

roywiggins wrote: post #278
sillyfluke wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also will have saved them all the cost of the AI summaries that are incorrect as well. The parent states: >Not only are the summaries better than those produced by our human agents... Now, since they have not mentioned what it took to actually verify that the AI summaries were in fact better than the human agents, I'm sceptical they did the necessary due dillengence. Why do I think this? Because I have actually t…

In the context of call centers in particular I actually can believe that a moderately inaccurate AI model could be better on average than harried humans writing a summary after the call. Could a human do better carefully working off a recording, absolutely, but that's not what needs to be compared against. It just has to be as good as a call center worker with 3-5 minutes working off their own memory of the call, not…

>in the context of call centers in particular I actually can believe that a moderately inaccurate AI model could be better on average than harried humans

You're free to believe that of course, but you're assuming the point that has to be proven. Not all fuck ups are equal. Missing information is one thing, but writing literally opposite of what is said is way higher on the fuck up list. A human agent would be achieving an impressive level of incompetence if they kept on repeating such a mistake, and would definately have been jettisoned from the task after at most three strikes (assuming someone notices). But firing a specific AI agent that repeats such mistakes is out of the question for some reason.

Feel free to expand on why no amount of mistakes in AI summaries will outweigh the benefits in call centers.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#312

Post by omnicognate »

lenerdenator wrote: post #55
highwaylights wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 95% of companies knew this was a money pit but felt obligated to burn a pile of money on it so as not to hurt the stock price.

I also wouldn't be surprised if bean counters were expecting a return in an unreasonable amount of time. "Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down." - some MBA somewhere, probably, trying and failing yet again to rub his two brain cells together for the first time since high school. J…

> Just agentic coding is a huge change

I've been programming professionally for > 20 years and I intend to do it for another > 20 years. The tools available have evolved continually, and will continue to do so. Keeping abreast of that evolution is an important part of the job. But the essential nature of the role has not changed and I don't expect it to do so. Gen AI is a tool, one that so far to me feels very much like IDE tooling (autocomplete, live diagnostics, source navigation): something that's nice to have, that's probably worth the time, and maybe worth the money, to set up, but which I can easily get by without and experience very little disadvantage.

I can't see the future any more than anyone else, but I don't expect the capabilities and limitations of LLMs to change materially and I don't expect to be left in the dust by people who've learned to wrangle wonders from them by dark magics. I certainly don't think they've "torched decades of best practice in my field". I expect them to improve as tools and, as they do, I may find myself using them more as I go about my job, continuing to apply all of the other skills I've learned over the years.

And yes, I do have an eye-wateringly expensive Claude subscription and have beheld the wonders of Opus 4. I've used Claude Code and worked around its shitty error handling [1]. I've seen it one-shot useful programs from brief prompts, programs I've subsequently used for real. It has saved me non-zero amounts of time - actual, measurable time, which I've spent doodling, making tea and thinking. It's extremely impressive, it's genuinely useful, it's something I would have thought impossible a few years ago and it changes none of the above.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/473

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#313

Post by shafyy »

sillyfluke wrote: post #257
dsr_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro-tip: don't write the summary at all until you need it for evidence. Store the call audio at 24Kb/s Opus - that's 180KB per minute. After a year or whatever, delete the oldest audio. There, I've saved you more millions.

You also will have saved them all the cost of the AI summaries that are incorrect as well. The parent states: >Not only are the summaries better than those produced by our human agents... Now, since they have not mentioned what it took to actually verify that the AI summaries were in fact better than the human agents, I'm sceptical they did the necessary due dillengence. Why do I think this? Because I have actually t…

Well, in my own experience, the LLMs that summarize video meetings at work are not at all 100% accurate. The issue is if you have not participated in the call, you can't say which part is accurate and which is not. Therefore, they are utterly useless to me.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#314

Post by tomwheeler »

dsr_ wrote: post #221
andix wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a follow-up call of a customer. They are referring to earlier calls and the call center agents needs to check what it was about. So they can skim/read the transcripts while talking to the customer. I guess it's really hard to listen to transcripts while you're on the phone.

That would be awesome! But in fact, customer call centers tend not to be able to even know that you called in yesterday, three days ago and last week. This is why email-ticketing call centers are vastly superior.

> But in fact, customer call centers tend not to be able to even know that you called in yesterday, three days ago and last week.

Nor what you told the person you talked to three minutes earlier, during the same call, before they transferred you to someone else. Because their performance is measured on how quickly they can get rid of you.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#315

Post by pseudosavant »

JCM9 wrote: post #16

We are entering the “Trough of disillusionment.” These hype cycles are very predictable. GPT-5 being panned as a disappointment after endless hype may go down as GenAI’s “jump the shark” moment. It’s all fun and games until the bean counters start asking for evidence of return on investment. GenAI folks better buckle up. Bumps ahead. The smart folks are already quietly preparing for a shift to ride the next hype wave…

When OpenAI went from GPT-3.5-Turbo to GPT-4 it seemed massive, and there were no other steps in-between. And nobody else had a meaningful competitive model out yet.

When GPT-5 came out, it wasn't going from GPT-4 to GPT-5. Since GPT-4 there has been: 4o, o1, o3, o3-mini, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, GPT-4.1, and GPT-4.5. And many other models (Llama, DeepSeek, Gemini, etc) from competitors have been released too.

We'll probably never experience a GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 jump again. If GPT-5 was the first reasoning model, it would have seemed like that kind of jump, but it wasn't the first of anything. It is trying to unify all of the kinds of models OpenAI has offered, into one model family.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#316

Post by [deleted] »

Spivak wrote: post #198
beepbooptheory wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Actually its good we aren't making money, this actually proves how revolutionary the technology is. You really need to think about adapting to our new timeline." You really set yourself up with a nice glass house trying to make fun of the money guys when you are essentially just moving your own goal posts. It was annoying two (or three?) years ago when we were all talking about replacing doctors and lawyers, now it…

How dare the business ask for receipts of value being produced in actual dollars! Those idiots don't know anything.

[deleted]

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#317

Post by Jolter »

ghalvatzakis wrote: post #228
the_snooze wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm under the impression that one of the most critical responsibilities a lead has is to establish and maintain a good working culture. Properly vetting new additions feeds directly into that. Why offload it to AI?

Just to clarify, these aren’t interviews for job positions

What kind of interviews do HR do, apart from job interviews?

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#318

Post by yalogin »

This is looking more like an enterprise cycle instead of a consumer one. I may be a bit jaded or over simplifying things, but I see this AI cycle as redoing enterprise workflows using AI. Not all of them will benefit from it and even then the incremental benefit or ROI from switching to an genAI automation is being questioned here.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#319

Post by Aperocky »

If there are zero return, then something is not being done right.

AI had led to significant operational improvements. The speed of root causing has increased by multiple times and the time spent head-desking or chasing leads have reduced significantly - even if the AI is wrong the first few times, it is recognizable that it would sometime be a rabbithole that I myself were likely to spend time - a lot longer time in.

It obviously cannot do these things by itself because it can arrive at the wrong conclusion all the time and be pretty stubborn about it, but at the same time to say there are no benefit is like throwing a bike away because you fell riding it the first time and go back to walking.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#320

Post by lljk_kennedy »

doorhammer wrote: post #230
jawns wrote: post #56

Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…

I'm curious, have you noticed an impact on agent morale with this? Specifically: Do they spend more time actually taking calls now? I guess as long as you're not at the burnout point with utilization it's probably fine, but when I was still supporting call centers I can't count the number of projects I saw trying to push utilization up not realizing how real burnout is at call centers. I assume that's not news to you…

Thank you, I came to say this too. You're mushing your humans harder, and they'll break. Those 5 mins of downtime post-call aren't 100% note taking - it's catching their breath, trying to re-compose after dealing with a nasty customer, trying to re-energise after a deep technical session etc.

I think AI in general is just being misused to optimise local minima in detriment to the overall system.

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